The Active Class

One of the most difficult things to do when teaching is getting students to engage with each other about the material in meaningful ways that move the needle of their understanding or skill-set. Instructors of small classes and large classes alike face this challenge everyday. It’s not easy to craft activity lessons that succeed in keeping students focused, on-topic, while connecting in small groups or class-wide discussion. We know that active, engaged inquiry, conversations and debates are exactly what’s required for students to retain information and grasp concepts and theories. When it works, and students are buzzing about the lesson, teachers may stand back for a moment and think, YES!

So, how to get that buzz going? There are so many ways. Clickers are one strategy that has worked for me.

Oddly enough, clickers are at base a 1-way tech tool. Teacher posts poll, students click-in. There’s no automated two-way feedback loop. And for that reason some faculty have criticized my decision to adopt clickers, admonishing me for reducing student engagement to a remote-controlled-yes/no function. I usually invite such naysayers to sit in on one of my classes, to see that 1-way polling is not the end of the story. It’s what happens next that is really exciting.

The buzz! It’s the one thing other clickerprofs warned me about: as soon as you open a poll, and again when you display the results, students are going to start talking to each other about the question. Get ready for the buzz! Very good advice, and it proved true of course on my first day using student response systems with a class of 300. For a teacher who has struggled for years to get students talking, this instant response was very energizing, very fun.

There are many strategies to use with clickers designed to keep students talking-on-task with each other. For example:

The easiest method is the “turn to your neighbor” example, wherein with preliminary results collected but not yet displayed on the screen, profs ask students to check in with the person seated beside them, to compare answers and justifications. According to Eric Mazur, the “turn to your neighbor and see if you can convince one another of the correct choice” method is effective because it supports students to engage in active learning and questioning and shifts the focus from the professor “teaching” the material.

The think-pair-share method also works wonders with clickers, with voting results displayed or not, asking students to check in with each other about their responses, then re-polling always results in more on-task buzz. This method is effective because “through this exercise, students get a chance to work through the question, and defend their position,” to cite Brian Young from Penn State (“Teaching With Clickers: Think Pair Share“)

Asking prediction questions is another conversation-generating technique that has worked well for me. As Derek Bruff observes, prediction questions are effective “since they allow students to commit to their predictions and compare their predictions to those of their peers. Then discussion of the incorrect answer choices provides an opportunity to deal with misconceptions.” Prediction questions do double duty, as “students become more interested in a demonstration when they have first committed to a prediction via a clicker question,” to borrow an insight from University of California at Santa Barbara’s comprehensive list of clicker question types. (“12 Ways UCSB Professors Are Using Clickers“)

I also use clickers to help students prepare for the exam (<– link opens PDF), by running multiple choice question polls drawn from my exam question bank. Whether polls are a quiz on the homework or asking students to recall a lecture point, in my experience these types of questions inspire a lot of quiet contemplation as the results are collected, then great whoops and sighs as results are revealed. Using clickers to help students with exam prep has been shown to increase outcomes and student engagement (<–link opens Word doc).

Clickers, a one-way technology, also work to provide timely feedback and summative assessment, letting students know whether they are “getting” the material. As one student commented, “when the prof asks a clicker question in class and you don’t know what the heck he’s even talking about, it helps you figure out what you need to do, so you can do better on the test, instead of like not finding out until the day of the exam that you don’t get it.”

The bottom line is that this simple technology, though not a pedagogical panacea, can help teachers create an active and engaged learning experience. They may transmit a one-way signal, but skilled clicker profs can use these gadgets to inspire a peer-to-peer information flow and create a cohesive, connected classroom.

Why I’m a Blogging Cheerleader

This semester I launched blogs for two of my classes (here and here), and as happens each year, I’m struck by the students’ original thinking, digital skill, and overall creativity.

I’m also impressed by how quickly they assume ownership of the blogs. When a prof sees that kind of engagement around an assignment, it’s a very good day.

In their blogging, students deliver results far beyond my expectations, and they require minimal tech-support (I use blogger, it’s free, very easy to figure out, allows for up to 100 bloggers, and there are many amazing free premium design templates).

My excitement about the student-authored blogs inspires me to travel all over the place enthusiastically encouraging other profs to incorporate blogging into their courses if they are not doing so already. Why? because in my experience these blog assignments are a source of pride to students and faculty alike. No matter the subject, blogging allows students to flex their digital creativity and let’s face it, there’s just not enough creative opportunity in most people’s everyday lives. Let’s create some!

What’s the ROI in Student Blogging? Ask an eMarketer!

There are many great course wikis and blog examples online to inspire professors thinking about how to develop this kind of course assignment. If you are curious about why students should blog, and which educational outcomes sync well with this activity, consider the following tips drawn from professional business bloggers. Although there are heaps and mounds of outstanding educational sources explaining the benefits of blogging, these fresh takes from the private sector are very insightful and valuable for educators to consider. From my perspective, these five ideas are immediately transferable from corporate cultures to HE classrooms.

1. Blogging is an opportunity to do self-directed research (insight borrowed from Valeria Maltoni/Conversation Agent blog).
Research has a bad reputation as a time-consuming drag, and maybe it once was, but in the age of Google it certainly isn’t any longer. Background blog research is an opportunity to indulge one’s curiosity and explore the corners of the web, collecting the best sources out there. “You start a topic with what you know,” writes Valeria Maltoni, “and expand it into things that others know,” which sounds a lot like self-directed learning to me.

2. Some of the best blogging is inspired by personal passions and interests. (insight borrowed from Mark Schaefer’s {grow} blog)
Rather than worrying about writing just for the teacher, and giving the prof exactly what they want to read in exchange for an A+ — blogging assignments can be used to encourage students to investigate connections between course-related topics and issues they’re genuinely passionate about. When students write online for themselves and their peers, demonstrating expertise and personal investment, it’s highly likely the resulting blog posts will be creative and original compositions that are more fun to read and write.

3. Blogging encourages us to develop professional communication skills and increased media savvy. (insight borrowed from Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation blog).
Blogging is writing in public, and that means spelling counts, embedded links need to be tested, and the information shared must be the highest quality it can be—else it’s immediately obvious to all that the author is neither thorough nor careful. It’s not just about A+ composition—blogging is also a demonstration of digital media skill. “The more media savvy you are,” Joel writes, “the more the likelihood will be that you will take that extra second before tweeting something, updating your Facebook status or publishing that blog post to ensure that the information you are about to share with everyone connected to you is as accurate and reliable as possible.” If the public nature of blogging encourages students to do a bit of extra proofreading, the blog-cheerleader in me thinks hip-hip!

4. Blogging involves sourcing and reading a lot of other blogs. (insight borrowed from Bret Simmons on the Student Branding Blog) There is likely no faster way for students to learn best practices in writing for the web than reading other blogs. The practice of reading online means students will bump into various perspectives and industry debates, news items, history, and controversies, when seeking out new blog topics. “Read blogs by those in your field,” advises Simmons, “watch what others are doing and integrate into your blog the things you like and eliminate the things you don’t like.” Not only does this informal “peer-to-peer” blog mentoring drive students’ self-improvement, it can also help them develop a distinctive voice and writing style, through comparing themselves to other active bloggers.

5. Blogging promotes community online and off. (insight borrowed from Chris Brogan/chrisbrogan.com) When students blog, and get participation points for peer-to-peer blog commenting, the result is class cohesiveness online and off. A class blog is a virtual venue wherein students can be encouraged to “make a point of engaging [the] community often in the comments section, on their blogs, on the other social networks where [they] cross paths” (Brogan). It’s a lesson in collegiality and if they use a service like Disqus, those comments become a part of their online digital footprint and personal brand. But how to assess student comments on a blog? Here’s a collection of blogging rubrics to get you started developing your own evaluation criteria:

• “Blog Reflection Rubric” from Jim Julius at SanDiego State University
• “Blogging Evaluation” from Brenda Dyck at Master’s Academy College
  and some pdfs:
• “Blog Journalling Rubric Based on Bloom’s Taxonomy” by Andrew Churches
• “Blogging Scoring” from Christopher 
Long
 at Penn State
• “Blogging Assessment Rubric” from The University of Regina

Last week I attended EDUCAUSE with the i>clicker and Panopto crews to talk about how to use a range of  technologies for innovative teaching in higher ed.

QR codes are hot!

Without a doubt the talk about QR codes in classroom and on campus was the biggest hit of all the mini-presentations I did, and here is the video: QR codes if you’d prefer to download or view just the slides, here they are:

It seems the barcodes are getting a lot of interest at the moment from educators and businesses both small and large. As more professionals, students, and educators adopt smartphones, it makes sense to experiment with mobile information sharing through QR codes. Although surveys of smartphone use put the figure at about 20% of the total mobile phone consumer market, in fact that number jumps to nearly 50% when we look at entrepreneurs, according to new research by Forrester. Among higher ed students there is a considerable percentage of smartphone users, but likely due to cost it hasn’t hit the tipping point yet. However according to Nielsen media, smartphones are projected to overtake feature phones in North America next fall.

Teaching with video

At EDUCAUSE we also talked with faculty about ideas for using video in teaching. Everything from videorecording whole lectures (lecture capture) to taping the answers to FAQ in advance. The video of that mini-presentation is available. One point that often gets mentioned when faculty debate videorecording the lectures is whether it will encourage students to skip class. This, despite reams of research to the contrary, remains a real point of concern. In this presentation we turned that query on its head, to suggest that if professors need to miss their own class to attend a conference, video recording some lecture material in advance may be just the ticket to increase flexibility for faculty. Here are the slides:

“Every day, thousands of people are forced to sit through dull, flat PowerPoint presentations,” observes Chuck Dietrich on Mashable. This is the case, even though “boring your audience is hardly the goal.”  What’s the solution? Socialize your presentations, not as a last-minute add-on, but at inception and by design. Dietrich suggests that video and image-rich slides are not enough—today the most compelling presentations are designed social.

Teachers can surely benefit from this advice, though it’s addressed to a business readership. But first, why would any teacher want to make their lecture more social than it already is, considering that many of us are already competing for attention from the wired generation of students who may already be chatting, Facebooking, and SMSing in class?

Because social media can herd cats, Dietrich argues. Well, no actually he didn’t suggest any such thing, but in essence the result is the same. Dietrich rightly points out that presentations designed to take advantage of social media communication trends are more likely to be perceived as compelling and relevant. Socialize your teaching and students will plug in to your content and community channels more fully, because it will feel like an experience customized for their learning styles and communication preferences.

Okay so how exactly can we socialize our speeches and presentations? It’s important to “seed innovation” by installing the right scaffolding to support student’s use of social technologies. On Dietrich’s list: live polling (using clickers or SMS) will add interactivity and interest.  Also on the list: add “short, tweetable sound bites to your slides” to enable participants to “quickly absorb and send out on their social networks.” Will profs consider this challenge? Maybe the most microbloggy among us. Others will repeat the now-classic Twitter backlash logic, arguing that nothing of value can be communicated in 140 characters—in spite of an avalanche of evidence to the contrary.

How about using social media to increase anticipation for the lecture, and perhaps increase attendance? Dietrich thinks this is both possible and important, because “reaching out to your audience using social media channels to get them excited about your talk” will “allow attendees to start discussions even before the event takes place.” Is this far-fetched for higher ed? In my experience, far from it. Here’s why:

I launched a Facebook page and Twitter hashtag for a course on mass communications, and for the first few weeks they were somewhat of a novelty. Then something amazing happened. Students began to tweet and facebook material for the UPCOMING week’s lecture, five or more days IN ADVANCE. Organic crowdsourcing of case studies, whitepapers, news articles, and statistics happened for the final three-quarters of the course, without any request to do so from me. Instead of guessing how to make lectures relevant and engaging to GenY, I saw that just designing a course to be social enables amazing innovations and conversations. And as a sidenote, I made sure to give shoutouts of sincere thanks in class to those who helped extend the lecture online.

It’s not difficult to sell professors on teaching plans that enable peer-to-peer learning. Today “the work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature,” according to the 2010 Horizon Report. Seen in this light, social web technologies can be very valuable, even essential. Status updates, whether on Facebook or Twitter operate as “micro-message” information vehicles traveling far and wide through the social web, observes Erick Schonfeld on TechCrunch. Teachers can “drive the micro-message bus” in our classes, if we want to have course content be at the center of students’ attention at a moment when digital culture is “sending them off in all different sorts of directions.”

However, even if we opt out of doing so, teachers may be surprised “to find our students sharing videos that we probably don’t know existed on their Facebook posts and Twitter updates,” warns Mike Richwalsky of John Carroll University in Pennsylvania. The question becomes: shall we get out in front of designing social teaching, or would we prefer to respond after students take it upon themselves to do so?

Luckily, students sharing course content via social channels enables class cohesion and community, or what Clive Thompson called social proprioception, which occurs when “a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.” Exactly.

Your lecture is scheduled for 50…75, perhaps 90 minutes. Maybe it’s a topic the students like, or you have a popular course, and they file into the room buzzing with anticipation. After 20 minutes or so, you feel the room’s energy starting to fade. Students are texting, reading the paper, checking Facebook, or just spacing out. Sooner or later, whether we like it or not, and regardless of class size, it happens. When it does, or possibly before we even get to that point, we often start thinking about “student engagement.”

“Engaging  students” can signify many things. It might be about presentation style; maybe you are as much a showman as a lecturer. It might be about the “hook,” as you find intriguing or controversial ways to introduce and discuss a topic. Or it might be about making the students interact, whether it’s with you, with the material, or with each other. No matter what path to engagement you prefer, it usually boils down to getting and keeping students’ attention.

Clickers are one way to increase engagement; this benefit has been widely reported, both anecdotally and empirically, especially in science and social-science courses. The large lectures standard in those fields are generally less common in the humanities, although we’re seeing larger class sizes and the transformation of some seminars into lectures in the face of budget crises. How might clickers help us engage students in the humanities, especially in larger courses?

One of the universal uses of clickers is to punctuate a lecture and vary its pacing. Stopping the lecture every 10-15 minutes for a clicker question or two serves several purposes. It can wake the students up just when they might be starting to fade away. They are then are forced to become more active in responding to (and presumably thinking about) a question. Even when clicker participation constitutes a small fraction of the total course grade, students will often pay more attention to the lecture when there are coveted points at stake. Even those students who usually resist engagement in class—those whom Graham et al. call “reluctant participators”—will participate.

Clicker questions can also be used to lessen the amount of actual lecturing that we do. The responses to a question can spur discussion; depending on the class size, you can either turn the lecture hall into a large discussion section, or you can allow the students time to talk things over in pairs or small groups. Peer instruction of this sort goes hand-in-hand with clicker systems. The interactivity can reinvigorate a class in just a few minutes.

In many humanities courses, we’re examining cultural or political issues from particular points of view. Another way to engage students is to use the clicker questions to set the scene or to create both relevance and interest. A colleague of mine, in an attempt to introduce the ideas of consumer culture and symbols, asked her class what kinds of things they did with their Barbie dolls when they were young. She used a handful of responses to create an impromptu clicker survey that showed most people engaging in similar activities. The students realized that “culture” was not just an abstract idea, but something they have a direct relationship with.

Another type of pre-question is the opinion poll. A controversial issue—of which there is no shortage in humanities classes—can be introduced with a question asking to what degree the students agree or disagree with a position. Once they have expressed an opinion, students often feel that they have a vested interest in the discussion, whether it is to defend their own ideas or to learn about others. As it becomes clear that the lecture content or assigned reading has a direct bearing on the issue at hand, this increased investment makes the material more real to them. These and other types of questions can help students connect with the topic at hand, giving them a stake in the discussion—and a reason to pay better attention.

Attention is the name of the game. It’s a no-brainer, but the more students pay attention, the more they’ll learn from a lecture. They will also enjoy the course more, which can create a positive energy-feedback loop for instructors. We know that it’s not easy to hold a student’s attention for an hour.  Breaking the lecture up and making the time investment more personal for students will make things a lot easier for both students and instructors.

For more information on clickers and engagement:

Bart, Mary. “Can Clickers Enhance Student Learning?” Faculty Focus. 18 Nov. 2009.

Bruff, Derek. “Engaging Students with Clickers.” Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009. 1-38. Print.

Butchart, Sam, Toby Handfield, and John Bigelow. Peer Instruction in the Humanities. Strawberry Hills: The Carrick Inst for Learning and Teaching in Higher Ed, 2007. Print.

Draper, Steve W., and Margaret I. Brown. “Increasing Interactivity in Lectures Using an Electronic Voting System.” Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 20: 81-94. Print.

Graham, Charles R., Tonya R. Tripp, Larry Seawright and George L. Joeckel III. “Empowering or Compelling Reluctant Participators Using Audience Response Systems.” Active Learning in Higher Education 8.3: 233-58. Print.

Patry, Marc. “Clickers in Large Classes: From Student Perceptions towards an Understanding of Best Practices.” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 3.2 (July 2009).